


Forget Me Not

by Neyiea



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Jeremiah being a creep, M/M, Post-Season/Series 04, Pre-Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:15:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23958265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyiea/pseuds/Neyiea
Summary: Something isn't right.
Relationships: Jeremiah Valeska/Bruce Wayne, implied
Comments: 11
Kudos: 104





	Forget Me Not

**Author's Note:**

> I was looking through my WIPs and found this, which I only ever posted on my tumblr however many months ago. Figured I may as well put it up here, too, before I forget about it again.

He steps into the apartment after a long day spent within the precinct and he knows immediately that something is off.

It isn’t anything obvious; nothing like an unfamiliar coat slung over the back of a chair or the hint of a lingering perfume. There’s just something wrong, as if every piece of furniture had been moved one inch to the left and Bruce’s eyes are noticing it even if his mind is having difficulty comprehending it.

He checks the lock on the door behind him for any signs of tampering. Then he checks every single window, even if there’s only one that connects to the fire escape at the side of the building and he’s three floors up. None of them look as though they’ve been touched either, but in a city full of criminal masterminds that doesn’t necessarily mean that Bruce’s instincts are being proven wrong.

He starts going through his and Alfred’s most precious commodities, one by one. The pieces of the gear that Lucius had given to him, a set of old knives that Alfred had taken from a pawn shop and sharpened himself via several wet stones and a leather strop, all of the medicine that they have on hand, and any items of value that they happened to have had before going back to Wayne Manor became impossible. Everything seems to be accounted for, and Bruce eyes the carefully sorted items and wonders if he’s missing something.

That is how Alfred finds him fifteen minutes later. 

He doesn’t appear too concerned at the way Bruce has spread all of their valuables over the kitchen table, he merely cocks one eyebrow and asks, “Are you looking for something in particular, Master B?”

“Alfred,” Bruce greets as he finally pulls his eyes away from the pile in front of him, his fingers tapping restlessly against the tabletop. “Does something in here seem different to you?”

“I’m assuming you don’t mean the slew of items that I am sure were all in their proper places when we left this morning?” Alfred’s tone holds a small flicker of humour, but he casts a glance around in any case, sharp eyes assessing everything in sight. “I don’t see anything amiss. Do you think we’ve had a break in?”

“I’m not sure. Everything worth stealing is still here, but something just doesn’t feel right.”

Alfred checks the lock on the door, and the windows, and even the fire escape itself since he’d apparently tied a delicate, pale string, looking only like the beginnings of a spiderweb, near the base of the handrails in case anyone started hanging around while the both of them were out. The string is still in one piece.

“In any case,” Alfred says after he’s concluded his own investigation, closing the blinds of the large windows that look into the main room. “We can’t be too careful. Maybe what was throwing you off wasn’t coming from inside.”

That’s a rather nice way to put that maybe Bruce had felt the sensation of being watched, and his body was putting itself on guard in response to it. 

There are a whole lot of unknowns, even within the Green Zone. People he’s never met, people who might find it odd that Bruce Wayne was stuck in this city when he, logically, should have been one of the first to be able to get out. It isn’t too impractical to think that maybe there are a handful of people who might take to watching him out of curiosity, or even out of anger if they thought he was somehow hoarding goods to himself.

He resolves to keep the blinds closed and hopes that that will signal the end of this. 

But just in case it doesn’t, and just in case someone was scoping out the apartment to attempt a break in, he opens each window a crack to place a strand of his own hair between the window and the frame, and then locks them up tight. 

A few days later there’s enough of a chill in the air that he decides to dig out the warm, worn sweater that he’d been wearing on the night where everything changed.

Only to find that it’s missing. 

It could just be chance, he tells himself, not wanting to become overly suspicious even as he checks every window to see that each still has one of his dark curls stuck between the frame. It could be that it had worn down even more in the last wash and Alfred had gotten rid of it without telling him since the warmer weather was finally on its way.

It could be nothing.

But it doesn’t feel like it. 

And a few days after that, as Bruce goes around on what has become his daily checks on the windows once he comes home, he finds that the window that leads out to the fire escape is missing his carefully placed mark. 

He asks Alfred if he’d gone out onto the fire escape recently, and when the answer turns out to be a ‘no’ dread washes over him. He opens the window and steps out, and Alfred’s spider-web string is still intact but there is no sign of Bruce’s stray curl on the floor, where it would have fallen whether by the window being opened or by it happening to slip out of place. 

He and Alfred go through their things, and again it seems as though nothing had been taken. 

But when Bruce cautiously sorts through his clothes, alone, he finds that his lost sweater has somehow returned. Almost as if it had never been gone in the first place and Bruce’s rising paranoia had only caused him to skip it over. He holds it away from his body, staring at it as if it might be hiding something more sinister, and eventually he becomes aware of a scent.

He pulls it closer to his face and cautiously inhales.

The smell of a familiar aftershave makes him drop the sweater to the floor in shock. 

Jeremiah, Jeremiah, Jeremiah, runs on repeat in his head.

This was more than just a cruel joke. Someone, perhaps Jeremiah himself, had snuck into Bruce and Alfred’s apartment, into Bruce’s room, had gone through his things and taken something that wouldn’t immediately be missed.

And then they’d returned it, smelling of _him_.

He carefully picks it up again and looks at it with an even more critical eye. The wearing fabric seems slack in places, as if it had been stretched out over shoulders and arms broader than Bruce’s own. 

As if Jeremiah had worn it. 

Something uncomfortable twists in his stomach, even as he goes to find Alfred and tell him what he’d discovered. 

Neither of them sleeps well that night. They move their belongings to a different apartment, five floors up and no fire escape, the following day. 

They keep the blinds closed.

Nothing goes missing during their first week in the new space.

They both stay on edge. 

And the next time he visits Selina it takes her approximately half a minute to remark on how tense he is. 

He licks his lips and wonders how frank he can be with her, and how she might react if he mentioned what had occurred in his and Alfred’s last apartment. In the end he can’t bear to mention Jeremiah’s name, not to her, and so he spins a tale that has just enough of the self-sacrificing that she’s come to expect from him, and she rolls her eyes and tells him not to work too hard.

He’s able to relax a little more as the visit goes on, surrounded by patients and staff who don’t even give him second glances any more, and eventually he notices a glass on Selina’s bedside table filled with small, blue flowers.

Forget me nots, he thinks they’re called.

“Did someone leave these here for you?”

Selina furrows her eyebrows before her gaze turns in the direction Bruce had nodded in. 

“Maybe. I don’t really pay attention to who goes in and out of here if it’s not you or Alfred.” Her expression flickers for a moment, softening at the edges. “Ivy left me plants in my room, once, before she changed for the second time. She wouldn’t give me anything that wasn’t planted, though. It must have been one of the nurses, or Alfred. That’s the side that you both always sit on when you come to visit me.”

Afterwards, when he goes home, he finds a stem of those same blue flowers that had been at Selina’s bedside laying on the doormat. They could be innocuous enough, perhaps it’s a common flower at this time of year, perhaps someone was just trying to be kind by leaving something that might brighten up his day.

He picks up the flowers and his instincts all scream that there is nothing completely harmless about this gift being left here—at the door of his new home, or at Selina’s bedside—where Bruce spends most of his non-working waking hours.

“Forget me not,” he murmurs. And it’s such an obvious ploy. Just another way to unnerve him and make him feel like he’s not really safe. Like even if he can’t find Jeremiah, Jeremiah will always be able to find him.

He crushes the flowers in his hand and casts them aside.

As if he could ever forget Jeremiah after all that he’d done.


End file.
